Massage establishments on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. The city of San Gabriel received a report on massage establishments and there were 52 of them in the small city on Nov. 7.
walt mancini — STAFF FILE PHOTO

A massage establishment on Valley Boulevard in San Gabriel. The four-square mile city of San Gabriel is now home to 50 massage businesses.
walt mancini — STAFF FILE PHOTO

City officials throughout California who are fighting for control over massage parlors see opportunity in the future as a controversial state law that regulates and protects the businesses is about to go off the books.

Several believe the law has encouraged illegal activities such as human trafficking and prostitution.

“There are a lot of concerns coming out of local communities, especially San Gabriel, about what has transpired because of the state law,” San Gabriel City Manager Steve Preston said. “It didn’t completely pre-empt local regulation but it so hamstrung it that a lot of the measures cities would normally use to control it have been taken away.”

The law, passed in 2009, established the California Massage Therapy Council, a nonprofit charged with issuing permits for all massage therapists in the state. The law also prohibits cities from restricting legitimate, licensed massage parlors and technicians unless they apply the same regulations to other licensed professional businesses like a doctors or chiropractors.

A number of local jurisdictions have seen the number of businesses jump exponentially since the law was passed; for example, the four-square-mile city of San Gabriel is now home to 50 massage businesses; Thousand Oaks has 47 and Huntington Beach has 74.

Cities from South Pasadena to Gardena, Fontana and Torrance have been vocal on the issue. They have organized stings and arrested massage parlor employees for prostitution in recent years, but many say they don’t have the resources to successfully police the illegal businesses. Some cities have passed local ordinances to regulate massage parlors, and others have imposed a temporary moratorium on new businesses, but most say without a change in the law their hands are tied.

The law will sunset in 2015, and the state legislature is in discussions to update it, working with cities and massage parlor owners.

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The League of California Cities has a list of changes it hopes to make to the law. League representative Kirstin Kolpitcke said the group wants a state agency to be given regulatory authority rather than nonprofit CAMTC, and that cities be permitted to impose unique restrictions on massage businesses.

“Cities and counties don’t uniformly regulate business professionals, they place restrictions on businesses based on the type of use of that business and the problems or benefits that might be associated with that,” Kolpitcke said. “Because of that language (in the current law) we can’t regulate massage at all.”

Kolpitcke said the group would like to see harsher restrictions in the state law for massage licensing, including holding business owners accountable for the actions of their employees. In addition, some say the process to get a license should be made more difficult and include requirements like forcing applicants to undergo a criminal background check.

“In the case of something like human trafficking, they can remove someone’s license but the business continues to operate. Nobody is regulating the business itself or the owner,” Kolpitcke said. “If I own a grocery store and a cashier sells alcohol to an underage person, not only would the cashier be in trouble but I would also be in trouble because I’m responsible for what goes on in the store.”

But cities aren’t the only ones looking for a better law, the CAMTC has also been involved in the process and CEO Ahmos Netanel said the agency is on board with harsher regulations to “weed out the bad apples.”

“We are proposing modifications to improve the law to make it stronger so cities will have even greater authority to deal with the problem of illegal massage establishments,” Netanel said. “We believe we share the concerns of the cities; we understand them fully.”

The Assembly’s Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection will hold a hearing on the new law Monday. It will be streamed online at abp.assembly.ca.gov.